TL;DR;

It displays the USA map with the states including DC / Hawaii / Alaska

It’s MIT license

Install instructions on The package section of this post.

Package origins

I am working on a project which may or may not go much further. I am building a Rails back-end and playing with React + Redux for the front-end.

This project requires me to have a map of US States and for it to be possible to customize the colors and add an “onClick” event for each state.

I decided to create a React component because said map will be used in more than one place in my project. I tried D3. It’s good, really good, but I needed something simpler. I have three weeks to do this project and between programming back-end and front-end alone I don’t have the time to do the perfect Chropleth map as much as I want to. It is a “nice to have” in my project, not a “must have”. Maybe after the end of the project I will open source it. I do need to check if I can legally open source the project since I am getting the data from a 3rd party with tight licensing requirements.

After finding this map on Wikimedia through the react-us-state-map package on npmjs.org I thought: this is a cool idea, to have the map as an SVG and then change the filling as I want it.

The first step for the package

I extracted the dimensions out of the <svg> and put in a JSON to be read by the component.

The second step

Facebook created this really cool thing for React: create-react-app. It allows you to have a boilerplate code for your react application without actually have to worry how to transpile your code for ECMAScript 2015 and configure webpack.

However they don’t have a create-react-package or create-react-component. Since I am just now going in this front-end adventure, I did what other developer would do in my place: I googled and found this repo.

The third step

I did some modifications on the package.json removing packages I wasn’t using and other necessary actions such as adding tags, scripts, etc.

The final step

Publishing to NPM is actually simple:

Once logged in the terminal run:

$ npm version 1.0.0 # your version number here
$ npm publish

After this I created a demo project to see if my map would work as intended.

The package

You can install using:

yarn add react-usa-map

or

npm install react-usa-map --save

Compatibility

It uses React 15.4.2 as minimum requirement and it is compatible with React 16.0.0.

More information

react-usa-map started with only me as a contributor, and since the release people contributed adding tests, continuous integration and new features.